November 25, 2008
VIDEO game cheats and pirates got some comeuppance last week, as Microsoft and Blizzard together banned or suspended hundreds of thousands of gamers for various infractions.
Microsoft got things started by banning from Xbox Live an unspecified number of gamers who had modified their consoles to play back-up copies of games, which the company regarded as pirated.
There were no official numbers, but the forums where such gamers cruise were full of outrage. ("How dare they ban me for playing pirated games!")
Blizzard, maker of World of Warcraft, was more forthright, saying it had banned 350,000 online players from its older StarCraft and Diablo II titles for using software cheats and hacks during online games against other players.
Cheating is nothing new but what's annoying is that video game companies are having to divert what seems to be a growing pool of resources to chasing and defeating these nincompoops.
That's time, money and labour that doesn't go to making a new game or improving existing titles.
THE recent Dallas Video Festival handed out an award to a documentary on video game violence called Moral Kombat. (Great title, by the way.) The movie is apparently an even-handed look at the explicit carnage found in many games.
I'm sure the issue will flare up again, but it does seem like game violence has ebbed in the last year or so as a hot cultural topic. That's because games won the debate without ever really addressing the issue.
People made a fuss about Grand Theft Auto and its sequels, for example, but the developers simply kept cranking out the games without apology.
After a while, the critics seemed to give up, and GTA continued to sell millions of copies.
Just as a forest fire can reignite after it appears to be extinguished, though, this tussle may not be over.
A game called MadWorlds under development by Sega for the Nintendo Wii could be a flashpoint.
The developers say their game "revolves around the themes of brutality and exhilaration".
That seems designed to get some people riled.
But maybe we've found other, even more politically sensitive topics to get hot and bothered over.
An upcoming downloadable game for PlayStation 3 called Fat Princess has feminists all twitchy because you have to rescue a rotund royal.
So perhaps fat is the new violent.
MCT